In information technology (IT) environments, performance degradations in service can cause serious impact, particularly in business service management environments. Businesses rely on services performing in reliable and with acceptable response to the end users. A key problem IT environments face is being able to respond and take appropriate actions to address service degradations in a timely and effectively manner. Generally, this relies on the operator's ability to isolate and correct the most likely root causes.
Certain root cause analysis products/technologies are based on the idea of correlating “Events” with other “Events”. U.S. Pat. No. 7,131,037, entitled “METHOD AND SYSTEM TO CORRELATE A SPECIFIC ALARM TO ONE OR MORE EVENTS TO IDENTIFY A POSSIBLE CAUSE OF THE ALARM,” which is fully incorporated herein by reference, discloses a method and apparatus for providing network performance monitoring, including the identification of a possible cause of a specific alarm in a network environment. This method comprises maintaining a database of alarms and events from a system of monitored elements and automatically identifying a possible cause of a specific alarm by correlating the specific alarm with a plurality of events using the database of alarms and events.
More specifically, in U.S. Pat. No. 7,131,037, an event-to-alarm correlator applies certain rules to events from the database and computes an event score or confidence factor for those events that satisfy the rules. The event score indicates the possibility of the event being the cause of the problem and is represented by a value ranging from the least likely to the most likely.
Advances in information technology continue to bring challenges to IT management. Consequently, there is always room for improvement.